Category Archives: Energy

Volvo to abandon conventional engines

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Did you catch this widely reported news today?

From the New York Times:

“Volvo, Betting on Electric, Moves to Phase Out Conventional Engines“

According to the story: “…Volvo’s move may be the latest sign that the era of the gas guzzler is slowly coming to an end.”

But a bit later in the story, this clarification:

Volvo’s transition will be gradual. It plans to still produce existing models with conventional engines after 2019, but it will no longer introduce new models with the older technology. Depending on demand, Volvo will completely phase out cars powered solely by gasoline or diesel by around 2024.

In any case, that’s not too long from today. The age of the corner gas station may be coming to an end. Do you suppose that soon you’ll have to search for someplace to buy gas, just as electric vehicle owners now search for available public charging stations?

That transition will reverberate through real estate circles, I would think, as well as through all those companies dependent on today’s transportation technology.

Cutting the ties to one’s local community

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Here’s a provocative message received from a reader who uses the name, Compare and Decide. I’ll let it speak for itself.

I don’t read Civil Beat any more. Every couple of days, I visit their site, but I usually don’t read any stories. If I look at a story, I read the first couple of sentences and then scroll down to the comments, which are usually pretty awful and uninformed, but which give a sense of what the public is “thinking” (if you can call it that).

I have not read the Star Advertiser for maybe five or six years. Your blog is my only reference to news in Hawaii. I click on it several times a day, and read the comments. I never watched the local news.

I now read the BBC online, maybe for the past year. Also, I have recently gotten an online subscription to the NY Times. That’s really satisfying. It’s global, but it also has real depth of analysis. Local news from any society is really kind of repulsive.

Interestingly, this growing disinterest in Hawaii on my part goes back several years ago to my cancelling a local bank account and opening a national online bank account. All of a sudden, I experienced this reorientation in my perspective, like I did not live in Hawaii. Or, rather, I felt like a part-time resident. Strangely, it felt like a bit improvement, like an expansion of horizons. That is what life is all about, expanding our horizons.

When Donald Trump visits a state, he tells the locals all about his business interests in their state, and how that investment makes him feel like a local, too. He is lying, I am sure. But when I become slightly less emotionally invested in this locality through something as small as cancelling a local bank account, it does point out how our practical interests shape our perspectives. We have a social position in the world which gives us our bias, and this is based on our economic placement in that world. There is an intersection between economic self-interest and the psychology of the unconscious that has not been adequately analyzed.

When the actor Richard Chamberlain moved to Hawaii, it was a big deal in his life (or so I was once told). He really got into this Native Hawaiian spirituality. Maybe it even saved his life. It seems like a lot of celebrities who retire to Hawaii are recuperating from life in LA. LA has a way of eating its children. It is said that the only way to survive working in LA is to live outside of LA (if one can afford it).

But after the Great Recession, like so many folks, Chamberlain had to go back to work. Suddenly, he was shocked that there are no jobs in Hawaii. “There is nothing going on here,” he said. Actually, the only thing going on is the growth of renewable energy, and one gets a sense that with its rapid change and complexity, it confuses the local establishment. So a tranquil, provincial society is a nice place to retire to because there is not much going on, but all of a sudden that can be a big problem.

But there is something else which might disturb retired outsiders who idealize Hawaii, which is small-town pettiness. When they do go outside of their small bubble of comfort, they encounter ignorance, pettiness, cruelty. One of the problems for a reporter is getting caught up in that silliness, because that is really all there is going on.

I did not read your article on the Dung sisters (whoever they are…). But there is the risk in local reportage of slipping into the gossipy ways of the locals, even in the course of an effort to show how petty the locals can be (which is what I expect your story set out to do).

Ian Lind, please return to hard news, like renewable energy issues.

Here is an article on peak oil (declining oil production). By 2022, there will may be no more fracking, and conventional oil production and exports are expected to decline in majors like Saudi Arabia. That does not necessarily mean that there will be a global economic crisis because the world has been moving away from oil since the 1970s, a trend that has been accelerating (declining or ‘peak’ oil consumption). The one exception is air travel, which relies on kerosene from petroleum, for which there is not yet an alternative.
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/what-happened-to-peak-oil

This is very relevant to Hawaii.

I just read this article which claims that it is expected that in one year from now, 80% of Puerto Rico’s population will be infected with the Zika virus.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/health/zika-virus-puerto-rico.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

That is very relevant to Hawaii. But the local media is not going to run this story. You could shoot off a one-paragraph post on this topic.

Ian Lind, think globally, act locally!

Oil bust bad news for many states

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Rock bottom oil prices have been a boon for drivers.

But for states dependent on the oil industry, it’s an unfolding economic disaster.

Here’s a graphic warning about undue reliance on a single industry. It was part of an email analysis emailed to clients of Charles Schwab.

The graph, distributed shows the percentage of state tax revenues from oil and gas production in 2015. These are known as severance taxes. It shows that two states, Alaska and North Dakota, get more than half of their tax revenues from taxes on oil and gas.

I suppose that’s great, at least for state budgets if not for the global climate, during periods of oil boom.

But during an oil bust, like today, it’s likely to be bad news as those oil and gas revenues slump.

The resulting economic pain is obvious. Unemployment is now high in many of these areas.

Schwab warns that smaller counties or cities in the oil dependent states could have trouble keeping up interest payments on their municipal bonds, increasing the risk of defaults that could ripple through the economy.

And I’n wondering about the political impact of this kind of meltdown during the presidential campaign. Economic pain is a potent source of political motivation that candidates will be trying to harness.

Anyway, more to think about.

Source: Charles Schwab

Reader: “I don’t buy the electric utilities’ grid capacity argument….”

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A reader using the name “Joe” left a comment on Wednesday’s post (“Energy economics and changing politics reshaping the solar industry“) which is worth responding to because it appears to reflect a misunderstanding of the debate over net metering.

Joe wrote:

I don’t buy the electric utilities’ grid capacity argument against net metering.

If the wires to my house can deliver 100 amps, they can return 100 amps. If the wires to the block can deliver 2000 amps, they can return 2000 amps.

An average 6KW solar system could produce a peak of 25 amps at 240 volts. Normal output levels would be somewhat lower, and some part of that will probably be consumed by electrical devices in the house.

So how is it that my 100 amp line is not capable of handing 25 amps?

The basic misconception here is that the problem with net metering has something to do with the carrying capacity of the wires to your house. Not so.

In what has become the traditional rooftop solar system, electricity is produced during sunny, daylight hours and fed into the utility’s grid. The utility pays for all the power that is fed into the system. At the end of the month, or the billing period, the amount paid for the purchase of that power by the utility is deducted from the amount the homeowner is billed for the power they draw from the grid during the same period. The amount they end up owing to the utility is the difference between those amounts.

There are several important points, in my view. That is that the homeowner with a rooftop solar system doesn’t use the power produced on their roof. It all goes into the grid. So if there’s a disruption in the grid–a traffic accident knocks over a utility pole and disrupts power, or a storm blows through and does broader damage to the utility lines–your rooftop system doesn’t power your house. It’s still trying to feed the power produced into the grid, even if the grid is not available.

Second, without expensive modifications to the existing electrical grid, there’s no way for the utility to regulate the amount of power they accept from each rooftop system.

To quote Morita again, “the output from rooftop solar is a must take resource.”

She explains:

Therefore, when there is excess electricity being generated due to low demand, it is the lower cost utility scale renewable generators, or electric utility generators and independent power producers that provide baseload and regulation power to stabilize the system that are being curtailed with a possible outcome of putting the entire electric grid at risk or making the utility run less efficiently and at higher costs. But, yet, these generators and other utility resources must still be available to ramp up rapidly to meet evening peak demand.

The old net metering incentives included paying top retail prices for rooftop solar output, even if that meant dumping cheaper, utility scale power that would otherwise be available. It was good for the homeowner being paid for their solar power, but not so good for the rest of consumers who had to pay the resulting higher rates.

Third, that is highly relevant because rooftop solar, and other types of solar installations, produce electricity during the day, but in Hawaii, the period of peak usage of electricity is at night. So at some point, and that point has long since been reached in Hawaii, rooftop solar is producing more than the system needs during the day, without any economical way to store or shift that power into the evening, when the overall demand is the greatest.

The point of all this is that it’s a complicated set of technical and economic issues that have to get sorted out. And while these are being confronted by utilities across the country, Hawaii is running into the wall first because of the success of the solar industry here.

Again, I highly recommend Mina Morita’s blog, Energy Dynamics, for insights into the situation we are all caught up in.